Game changers: developing graduate faculty for a technology-rich  (Page 9/14)

Our professional learning community (PLC) meets monthly for 2 hours to interrogate pedagogical assumptions. The seven core members who are departmental faculty colleagues selected The Flat World and Education (Darling-Hammond, 2010) to serve as the centripetal force of the group’s focus. Our secondary texts, which are jigsawed by members of the group, are Essentials of Online Course Design (Vai&Sosulski, 2011), eModerating (Salmon, 2011), and Teaching Online (Ko&Rossen, 2004). We gravitated to Darling-Hammond for the discussion of critical issues of equity, access, power, and impact of technology and to the other texts for their specific and practical considerations for effective online teaching and learning.

The PLC also utilizes two Critical Friends (Cushman, 1998) protocols: the consultancy protocol and the tuning protocol. These protocols are frameworks or processes used to critically reflect on and examine our practice—individually and collectively—in order to best serve and challenge students. The consultancy protocol is a process that utilizes critical reflection and collaborative dialogue for problem solving. The tuning protocol involves collegial analysis of a document or artifact (e.g., student work samples, course syllabus, online course content). Because “improvement of teaching practice develops through inquiry and dialogue that is critical, reflective and constructive, taking place in social contexts with supportive peers” (Ward&Selvester, 2012, p. 112), Critical Friends’ protocols are an effective way for our PLC to advance our teaching practices.

The purposes of the 90-minute monthly technology labs are to build faculty comfort and skill regarding online learning tools and provide instructors with the opportunity to explore these tools by “messing about” with them in a relaxed, collegial context. Colleagues internal and external to our Department and university facilitate the labs. Lab topics include the ins and outs of Blackboard, Blackboard Collaborate, Web 2.0 tools, online collaboration, and developing class culture and connections via distance learning. While the PLC involves in-depth exploration of professional learning over time, participants of the technology sessions gain structured support for immediately implementing the new learning.

As program faculty, we present at various technology-friendly conferences and share our learning with the group through retreat sessions, tech lab sessions, and PLC conversations. These sessions are a productive way for faculty to gain a sense of what the trends are in the use of technology for learning, best practices in online learning, and innovations in the field. A benefit of voluntary learning opportunities is that faculty participants who are not core team members genuinely contribute and engage in change initiatives (Hewitt&Weckstein, 2011) and their own learning, which in turn has the effect of building a critical mass for change (Reeves, 2009).

Formative challenges to our online learning culture

Challenges to our online learning culture have arisen in informal but scheduled faculty conversations since 2007, and they are an application of issues related to change in faculty members’ work that emerge when any new initiative is discussed in a graduate department. A constellation of events such as grants and oversight compliance bodies drew us into program-wide conversations about distance learning, technology-based curriculum, and our professional development. We record our ongoing dialogue in such media forms as electronic exchanges, fieldnotes, and videotapes of professional development sessions. We have faced various challenges in developing professional learning opportunities around online learning.